FAST Search for Sharepoint 2010
With the launch of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on 12th May, what are the key facts you should be aware of as far as Enterprise Search / FAST is concerned?
- FAST is Microsoft’s flagship Enterprise Search solution – highly scalable and configurable and able to handle huge volumes of data and traffic, it is one of the market leaders in Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology.
- SharePoint is point solution-oriented, so to enable true federated search not only within SharePoint but also across other disparate, multi-format data repositories, enterprises should seriously consider integrating higher-end search functionality such as FAST. This also avoids costly and time-consuming data migration exercises.
- Microsoft has recently restructured its FAST licensing strategy when integrating it with SharePoint 2010, making it much more competitively priced and therefore a significantly more attractive option commercially.
Microsoft’s 10 reasons to consider FAST Search for SharePoint 2010:
1. Advanced content processing and linguistic features
2. Automatic metadata extraction
3. Sophisticated structured data search (for data with numbers, dates, and other encoded information.)
4. "Deep” Refinement (Faceted Search across results sets of any size while retaining precise counts on facets)
5. Visual Search (Thumbnails and Previews to help users judge more quickly what is relevant in a search result)
6. Advanced linguistics and language processing for dozens of languages, including Chinese/Japanese/Korean
7. Visual best bets- rendered in the form of images and even videos
8. Best-in-class development platform enables an extremely high level of configuration and customization
9. Customised search experiences according to type of user
10. Extreme Scale and Performance in terms of document volumes and queries-per-second
How is all this relevant to Mongoose IT?
- As a tier 1 Microsoft-certified FAST Partner, Mongoose IT is one of very few consultancies specialising purely in Enterprise Search and in particular FAST – including integrating FAST with SharePoint.
- To ensure a successful implementation of FAST requires a specific blend of specialist skills – from both a technical and business process perspective – that are not usually found within in-house IT teams.
- The major FAST implementations that Mongoose IT has undertaken have given the Mongoose team unprecedented experience of the best practices required to ensure a successful FAST implementation.
- As a completely independent consultancy, Mongoose IT can give you authoritative, but hype-free, guidance around your overall Search strategy, Content / metadata strategy and Search project best-practice.
Strategic SharePoint partnerships:
Mongoose IT has strategic partnerships with two of the leading SharePoint implementation services providers in order to augment their service portfolios with specialist Enterprise Search and FAST expertise:
